The Boy Girl Factor

Today started our first real day of ESL training where I am involved in the speech workshops that try to help the students become more comfortable with public speaking. So the day started out with a lecture by one of the professors here, Dr. Gamble. He was amazing with his approach to speech communication and had the kids jumping up and down, laughing and even doing a drum role to introduce the faculty. The kids loved it! In traditional Chinese education, how I understand it, is there is rarely much interaction between student and teacher. Most of the time it is the teacher lecturing without interaction or commentary from students. So this lecture was a huge change from them and I think most of them really didn't know what to think of, but many of them absolutely loved it! In the afternoon we had breakout sessions and I had a class of my own where we had exercises for them to practice speaking in front of the class. So being the mean teacher that I am I purposely divided them up by boy and girl (Chinese students are very very shy, especially with the opposite sex!) The students were hysterical! All laughing and oohing and awing at their friends that were paired with a girl, but that soon stopped when I paired everyone with their opposite. I must say it was pretty funny watching them try to talk to one another. It hurt just watching them, it was sooo awkward! I felt like I was back in middle school. But in the end they did fine and I got a big kick out of it. I just can't believe how different things like that are here. The students are so much more immature because many of them have been studying their whole lives to get to college and have never experienced much more then that. They have never had time for a life out of school let alone time for a boyfriend or girlfriend. It's like watching the evolution dating, this seriously should be a reality tv show.